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Phase 2: Corrective Care (Teaming Up for Optimal Health)

Improving Your Posture

As Clinical Massage Therapists, we generally regard the elimination or improvement of symptoms as the easiest part of a client’s care. However, if we simply resolve the pain complaint and stop there, the pain complaint is likely to return. In most, but not all, cases, in order to prevent a rapid recurrence of symptoms, it is necessary to continue receiving care even though your symptoms are gone.

During the correction / restorative phase of your care, your therapist will help you examine your lifestyle and reveal any exacerbating and perpetuating circumstances that may be present. These are habits in which you may be participating that, if left unchanged, can cause your pain complaint to “crop up” again. Your therapist will help you identify these exacerbating and perpetuating circumstances and help you make a plan to avoid them. This may involve making adjustments to your sleeping positions; recreational activities; workplace ergonomics; and / or driving positions. This phase of care may involve your therapist offering you printed handouts, or directing you to various videos and / or articles online that we feel may be of use to you.

This phase of care will also involve your therapist addressing musculature that is not directly involved in your pain complaint, but which is part of a complex that is contributing to your pain complaint. This may involve, for example, addressing trigger points in the muscles that are antagonists or synergists to the muscles that have already been addressed.

This phase of care will also likely involve your therapist offering exercises and / or stretches that will target the musculature that needs to be strengthened, lengthened, etc. This phase of care will also likely involve a periodic re-evaluation of your posture and gait and a re-administration of the range of motion and muscle strength testing that you underwent previously. All of this will help you and your therapist track your progress and identify areas that still require improvement.